On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Frank Atanassow wrote:
> Jerzy Karczmarczuk writes:
> > ...although apparently there are exactly two readers/writers
> > of this thread on this list. Oh, well, it is as boring as any
> > other subject.
>
> I'm reading it. I think this field of application could be very
> interesting. Jan, could you write up a paper on it, with enough of the
> mathematical background for non-physicist CS people to grok it?
Well, Frank, there are zillions of papers and books on
mathematical background of QM and I certainly would not add
anything of a consequence here. A theoretical foundation of
Quantum Mechanics is the Hilbert space. Dirac's formalism
is a neat notation for that space and the physicists like it,
but you could use any other notation for that matter.
If you are asking for a paper on application of
QM that's again uncountable a task.
But if you are asking for a paper on QM vs. FP - that's
another story. Jerzy sent one pointer in his last post.
I hope more papers of this kind will appear in the future.
I would like to elaborate a bit more on what was already
said on applications of QM. There are tonnes of riches
of QM worth exploring. Some mathematicians have done it in
the past and some do it today. Some do not have a clue
what's there and that's a pity. This is what I have learned
from my days as a consultant in an engineering field:
a real life brings more interesting puzzles that I could
have ever invented by sitting at my desk and scratching
my head. (*)
Open any book on Quantum Mechanics and flip the pages
at random -- there is high probability that wherever
your finger points there are still some unresolved
problems waiting for you to compute.
Jan
(*)
P.S.
Speaking of real life inspirations...
One apparently silly example: At a top of a high class
office bulding there is a running track for afficionados
of exercising. Runners cause track vibrations. Vibrations
cause noise. Noise propagates few stories down and annoy
the VIP. The VIP wants the problem fixed. The building
is new and noise/vibration consultants had been involved
in the project from the start. But they obviously missed
something.
Well, the track is isolated by sandwiched layers of
rubber and other isolation. Stress waves reflect and
refract in the sandwich, which happens to have some
undesirable coefficients of refractions. As a result
the standing waves build up to extremely high levels.
Now, someone, somewhere could have written a paper
"Isolation properties of sandwiched materials", but
how on earth he/she would ever invented something
of this sort in the first place or - granted that -
how could he/she ever appreciate an importance
of this little problem?
Yesterday my friend posed a question about a concentric
cable whose 1 mm diameter conduit is welded to the base
of a printed circuit board. All of this sits on some
tower in Texas and is exposed to extreme temperature
changes. That causes high stress concentrations on
the contact surface between wire and the weld. The weld
breaks. But that's another unbelievable story...
